The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  But Taradash remembers Andersonville for more than that minor annoyance. He called the failure to produce his script “the biggest disappointment of my writing life.”

  —

  Mack was now sixty-one, my age as I write this, an age I am keenly aware is the beginning of a relationship with mortality that can only be guessed at in earlier decades. In Mack’s case, old age came on like gangbusters. The heart problem led the way, a bursting of the dam. His bad leg formed another abscess and required an umpteenth surgery. A suspicious mole had to be removed from his thigh (benign, it turned out) and precancerous tissue scraped from his mouth (a result of the constant pipe sucking). Irene woke up one day in April 1965 with fever and abdominal pain, and ended up in the hospital undergoing an emergency appendectomy—only, when the surgeon got it out, the appendix didn’t seem sufficiently inflamed to explain the condition. Back home she went. The next morning she awoke “in utter agony, her abdomen distended, the toes of her left foot turning blue, the leg as white as alabaster,” Mack wrote. Classic signs of an embolism. She was rushed back to the hospital, where surgeons, fearing they could lose her at any moment, discovered five massive clots in her left femoral artery. Worse, the artery itself had degenerated to the consistency of cheese. Just a year or two earlier, she would have died on the operating table, but the then-new technique of replacing the artery with a Teflon tube saved her life.

  Exactly a month later, in the first hours of Memorial Day, the phone rang in my grandparents’ bedroom at 2:30 a.m. Donald Friede, Mack’s agent/editor for exactly twenty-five years, had died of a sudden heart attack.

  “To say that it was a crushing blow to me is to put it mildly,” Mack wrote.

  I find it odd and a little disturbing that, though I had been eleven years old during this deluge of ill tidings, old enough to be aware—at least of my mother’s anguish about her father’s heart issue and her mother nearly dying—I have no memory of any of this. My sister doesn’t remember, either—but she was only nine, so maybe that’s to be expected. My brother, who was thirteen, has no good excuse, but, like me, remembers nothing. Possibly my mother thought she was shielding us from upset by not telling us the scary news. But I have an uneasy feeling it is at least partially due to our self-absorption, a tendency to lack empathy, even for our grandparents, when the pain is offstage, out of sight. Yes, all children may share that tendency to a varying degree, but I have often wondered if I tended toward it a little more than most.

  When my parents separated in 1961, they gathered the three of us—nine, seven, and five—together on the living room couch. Sitting opposite us, across a Danish modern coffee table, in mismatching armchairs, they launched into a shaky but obviously rehearsed speech. They loved us and still loved each other, but they were going to live apart—just for a while. What I remember most about it was this: I looked from my brother to my sister, and both were crying. I wasn’t crying, and decided that said something about a way in which I was different from them.

  I don’t want to overdramatize. What I felt could just be a valuable inner confidence, an innate self-reliance, or simply a streak of pure practicality—what good would crying do, after all? But emotional distance is also an element in the extreme kind of sociopathy exhibited by my great-grandfather John Kantor. As is true with alcoholism, geneticists believe sociopathic disorder is about half due to genetic makeup through production of proteins that affect the way the brain operates. Could the tendency I’ve noticed in myself be some thankfully watered-down inheritance from John?

  Or, to consider it from a less fraught angle: Do I at least wish that I had been more aware, more attuned, to the suffering of people I loved?

  Yes.

  —

  Judging from his letters, and his subsequent production, Mack rebounded from all of this adversity with admirable stoicism. He went back to work on another big historical novel, an idea he’d played around with not very successfully before he’d set it aside to plunge into the whirlwind that was Andersonville. Now he outlined the whole project—a story told through the eyes of a southern widow before the Civil War who buys, and becomes fascinated by, a slave.

  Once again, despite the relative disappointments of the recent past, his name and ideas seemed to make magic. The proposal for the novel, Beauty Beast, provoked a bidding war between two publishers. The winner agreed to an advance of $250,000 for the book rights alone—an astonishing $1.7 million in inflation-adjusted dollars.

  “We signed the contract a little before the noon hour in the Putnam office. . . . It was the first deal of this kind, and the largest, ever made in New York—at least according to the editors and agents involved,” Mack boasted. Any intimation that he might be past his prime must have simply blown out that conference room window.

  Mack finished the book in less than a year.

  “Then the trouble began,” he wrote. “It was turned down by all of the book clubs.”

  Now that the bloom was off the prose, the publisher “objected to certain things in the book. Then everyone at the office started raising their little voices, and saying the book would be better if written this way or that way. Of course I was adamant. . . .”

  He probably shouldn’t have been. Beauty Beast came out to a maelstrom of criticism, and worse, disinterest.

  The Kirkus review began, “This turbid novel in which almost no story is embedded in a splotchy style . . .” It didn’t get any better from there, concluding, damningly if not accurately, “Mr. Kantor spent fourteen years writing this novel and perhaps it was as difficult to write as it is to read.”

  The cover blurb begins: “This rich sensual novel of a woman’s forbidden love for a magnificent young slave . . .” and you don’t have to read much of the book before agreeing with a contemporary online review that says, in its entirety, “Wrong, on so many levels.”

  Beauty Beast reached the open doorway [of the bedroom]. . . .

  “Missy, you— You said that I was to—”

  “That you were to come to me here.”

  He took a cautious step beyond the doorway. Stopped.

  “Missy . . . You said that you had something which you wished to offer me?”

  “I wish to offer you myself.”

  She heard the long intake of breath, and lay pulsing in natural expectancy, knowing how she desired him. . . .

  He came springing. . . .

  And when it wasn’t like a bad romance novel, it was just plain bad writing. Mockingbirds “sang out the miracles of their latest brooding,” and the morning light “congratulated the woman on her restrained beauty.”

  If I look hard, I can find faint intimations of these tendencies in my grandfather’s earlier books, but he had nearly always veered away from the cliff. In Beauty Beast, it seemed, the critical mechanism that had ruled against my grandfather’s worst tendencies as a writer—we all have them—had simply deserted him.

  Bottom line: A man who made jokes in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was referred to as “Martin Luther Coon” had no business writing about a white woman lusting after an enslaved black man—even if his writing hadn’t tipped into a pothole the size of the Ritz.

  In the half century since publication, Beauty Beast has been blessedly forgotten. I don’t think I could have even recognized the title as one of my grandfather’s works. But as the pieces from letters and newspaper clips and Internet searches began to fit together in my conception, the book built from a curious footnote into a smoking gun. Beauty Beast was no simple misstep. It was a catastrophe.

  As to the scope of the damage, Mack seemed entirely deluded, blaming the mess on the publisher’s lack of support and uneasiness with the edgy subject matter. “It could easily become the top best seller in the Nation,” he wrote. “But I fear they are chickening out.”

  Today, in more sensitive and socially connected times, Mack would have become an Internet punching bag a
nd punch line. In 1967, he was simply shunned. The spectacular failure, combined with the fact that Putnam had paid a record-setting advance and invested in a big advertising campaign, left upon Mack an ineradicable stench he refused to acknowledge.

  “I wrote the best book I am capable of writing. . . . Whatever happens, I’m satisfied. . . . A quarter of a million dollars is a quarter of a million dollars, even if we don’t sell the picture rights.” And then, pathetically, I thought, he closed with this: “Several people close to the deal have remarked that Beauty Beast would make a marvelous play.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Beauty Beast was my grandfather’s last big payday.

  It seems ironic to me now, but it was almost immediately after that disaster, in 1968, that my family moved from New York to a modest home on a canal on Siesta Key, less than a mile from my grandparents’ house. I had no sense of Mack as having endured some dramatic change of fortune. He was as he’d always been. He still had money—that quarter mil was flowing in bit by bit. He still presided over his stretch of subtropical paradise; still convened weekly cocktail-sodden lunches of Sarasota’s most notable writers, his braying voice rising above all others; still opined colorfully for profiles written by mostly respectful newspaper columnists and feature writers.

  And he still closed the door to his memory-stuffed study and wrote.

  In proposing another three-book contract to his agent (which would be his last), he wrote: “I have never learned to live without writing, and I never shall.”

  Willfulness, and egotism, had pushed him through a ledger book filled with his handwritten record of a thousand rejections and carried him from nearly hopeless desolation of a coatless winter in the depth of the Depression to the ascendancy of a Pulitzer Prize and riches beyond his imagination. It pushed him still.

  But the vessel had weakened. “There’s another doctor whom I wish to consult about my general health,” he wrote. “A specialist in energy, so to speak. I so long to recapture the physical energy which has driven me on through the years.”

  In this diminished state, he lacked the stamina for a big new project. He began to cobble together bits of his past for repackaging and recycling—a collection of already published short pieces called Story Teller; I Love You, Irene, the sequel to his 1947 autobiography, which was already mostly written; and Hamilton County, the mishmash of essays and stories—mostly written long ago—combined by slim pretext with my uncle’s photographs taken in a dozen counties of that name. None of these sold well, and the reviews ranged to the vicious.

  “MacKinlay Kantor’s subject matter and techniques are sentimental, unsophisticated, and old-fashioned,” began an all too typical review.

  Another concluded: “As a stylist and a thinker Kantor had gone as far as he was ever going to go back at the point of time when Edward VIII was deciding that he wanted Wallis Warfield Simpson more than Britain’s kingship.”

  Yet another: “He manages to sound as garrulous as Polonius in his cups and as self-conscious about it. And worse: as bigoted as a Wallace and as belligerent as a LeMay. . . . And even worse: as cantankerous as a retired Midwesterner a-settin’ on his front porch in Sarasota retirement, which is exactly what and where Kantor is.”

  As a writer, I know you can claim to be unconcerned with critical opinion, to trust your own judgment above all else—and indeed my grandfather said just these things. But I also know negative reaction is like sand poured into that delicate engine of motivation, the self-belief that allows you to push through the appalling swamp of the writing process.

  Add declining health, disappearing energy, and the ever-increasing skepticism of publishers to the toxic mix, and it’s amazing my grandfather was able to keep working at all. Yet he did.

  With all his vanities, prejudices, and arrogance creating a kind of fog around him, I’d never appreciated just how heroically he kept pushing on. A passage in one of his “Dear Everyone” letters particularly moved me. “Work,” he wrote, “has been our atmosphere, our sky, our planets. Work has been the earth between our feet. Work has been the fire where we warmed ourselves and it has been the blast which froze us. . . . Work is our lunch, our agony, our inheritance, our God, our monster.”

  If work was the monster, he was its Dr. Frankenstein, bringing it to life each day before dawn behind that big desk with its heavy freight of memorabilia, manuscript pages, and unpaid bills. Even as his prospects diminished, he refused to yield. He pumped out a little novel about a Korean vet and his wife on a cruise ship tour of Asia (of course, he and Irene had to take a cruise to Asia so he could write it) that earned little money and even less benediction from critics (“A long way from Andersonville and still some distance from modern times, even if it takes place in the present”).

  In what must have been an especially galling concession to his circumstances, the man who less than a decade earlier vowed he was “no ghostwriter” hired himself out to a rich widow of a man who made a fortune in the insurance business, of all things, to ghostwrite a vanity memoir. She paid him $85,000 to do it, but of course he had to spend God knows how many hours of his dwindling energy and take an extensive and expensive Alaskan cruise (because the subject had a fascination with Alaska) to get the thing written.

  And then he made one last thrust, a final attempt to recapture the Andersonville magic in a novel about the American Revolution called Valley Forge. It was clearly an exhausted rather than an exhaustive effort—more a collection of sketches than a proper novel. The dialogue was even more arcane than in Spirit Lake. The publisher who originally bought the idea rejected the manuscript, and Mack scrambled to find another, off-brand publisher.

  The advance was tiny by comparison to those past, and the extended cruise on which he wrote the book was even more fabulously expensive than the Alaska one, through the South Pacific to Australia. But he had hopes the book would break through, like Andersonville, like Long Remember and The Voice of Bugle Ann, changing the equation once more. Despite the downward shift in publishers, the publicity department managed at least a small advertising campaign—increasingly rare in publishing even then—and the book attracted some advance press, in which Mack was still talking about his chances of winning a Nobel Prize. (“Should win me the Nobel,” he told one interviewer “in his staccato, telegraph like syntax. ‘Shoulda won it for Spirit Lake.’”)

  One of the photocopied newspaper articles on Valley Forge in the Library’s files snapped me to attention. It was a feature column in the Fort Myers News-Press, the inaugural column of a writer named Randy Wayne White. Two years later, I would get my first newspaper job at this paper and get to know Randy, having no clue that his first column had been about my grandfather.

  “Physically, age is catching up with him,” White wrote. “You notice it in his short shuffling gait and in the wisps of white hair which cover his head like hoar mist. When he lights his pipe, the broad, wrinkled hands shake slightly. . . . But Kantor, the ageless MacKinlay Kantor, lies just behind the speckled green poet’s eyes. . . . You don’t believe him when he says, ‘Why have I succeeded as a writer? Well, it’s like the old prostitute who was asked, “Why are you a whore?” And she said, “Just lucky I guess.”’ . . . With Kantor, luck begins at 4:30 in the morning.”

  But now no amount of work would change his luck.

  Valley Forge earned respect from a few reviewers like Robert Kirsch of The Los Angeles Times, who saw in the book “a powerful sense of personal witness . . . convincing human voices and emotion . . . the American Revolution itself.”

  But some were actively hostile, even mocking my grandfather’s insistence on using authentic period spelling. Kirkus sneered, “The novel shows contempt for everyday narration and proceeds, fragment by ‘smoaky’ fragment, as the author’s heart dictates.”

  The first printing was advertised at thirty-five thousand copies, but it didn’t sell nearly that many.

  Now Mack was b
randed by failure, and he knew it. What he didn’t know, couldn’t imagine, was that his life’s work was finished. The last word of Valley Forge was the last word of the last book he would ever publish. That word was: pride.

  I was twenty-one when Valley Forge came out, and I remember visiting him at his house while home on my final college winter break. He shook my hand as always, and there was something extra in his smile, a little gleam in his eye, as he pulled himself erect and limped over to the bookshelf to pull out a fresh copy of the book. He turned, the smile growing wide enough to reveal the full upper plate that so often plagued him, and handed it to me. It is the book that now sits beside me on my desk while I type these words, its cover jacket scuffed and torn at the binding. I must not have looked at it too carefully back then, because only just now, as I opened it to find the publication date, did I notice the dedication: to his grandchildren.

  —

  Mack included in his bequest to the Library of Congress even his tax returns, so it was depressingly easy for me to see the horrific details of the transition from record-setting advances to . . . almost nothing. In 1972, his total earnings barely topped $8,000. And yet he continued to live as he had become accustomed to living, which is to say, grandly. His “professional expenses” that year, including the extended Asian cruise that he deemed necessary to lubricate his writing process (along, no doubt, with uncounted Gibsons at onboard watering holes), totaled more than three times his annual income.

  For a man who had made, over the course of his career, the contemporary equivalent of tens of millions of dollars, this should not have been a huge problem. But, incredibly, except for the beachfront land and the home—updated and expanded with Andersonville money—he had no investments and no assets, and soon his once prodigious savings had dwindled to the point where he had to retake mortgages on his home to pay his bills.